To get kids more familiar with the characters, use this handout: EggScapadeCharacters. It’s a simple matching exercise and it helps them remember/learn the names of the animals in the story. Then you can have them guess the order in which certain events happen using this handout: OrderEvents. You can cut the stripes of paper beforehand or have them cut them in class. After they watch the short film, they check to see if they guessed the right order.

I also came up with some questions especially for my KET students (they’re quite strong learners). You can find them below:

Who’s your favourite Ice Age character? Why?

Imagine you lived in the Ice Age. What would you wear? What would you eat? Where would you live?

Would you rather be more like Manny or more like Diego? Why?

Have you ever seen an egg hatching?

Have you ever been on an egg hunt? How many eggs did you find?

I hope you’ll find all this useful. I’d love to get any feedback on the handouts.

I designed these cards with Starter kids in mind but I think they can work just fine with Movers as well. I use them with early finishers. If they finished the task they were working on, they pick a card from the deck and do what it says on it (all the activities on these cards are writing activities).

Just print them on card, cut around the dotted line, put them in a deck and keep them in the classroom. Download them here: EarlyFinishers.

Here’s a little board game to help your students review the past simple of the verb To Be. It’s very controlled practice and it can be used as a consolidation stage before moving on to freer practice. First students can play the board game in groups and then they can write their own sentences using “was” and “were”. I designed this mainly with the affirmative form in mind, but you can definitely extend it and have the students come up with the negative or interrogative forms of the sentences on the board.

This is similar to the worksheet I posted earlier about the steps of decorating a Christmas tree. However, this one can be used for any kind of “how-to” writing activity that you might want to organize in the classroom. Get your students to focus on the steps of a writing activity with the help of this very straightforward worksheet: HowToSteps.

There can never be enough templates for letters to Santa so here’s a cute looking one courtesy of Eugenia aka Santa’s helper and Handouts collaborator. All you have to do now is print it and start writing your letter to Santa. Download it here in pdf format: ToSanta.

Or maybe you want to save it until after the holidays and use it as a Thank You note to Santa. It would make a nice writing activity for the first day of school, don’t you think?: )

I was inspired in coming up with this activity by a lesson in Face2Face Upper-Intermediate (p. 84) on introductory phrases that emphasize what we are going to say next.

After you have taught and practised the phrases (you will find them on the third page of the handout below), cut the squares from the first page (or the second if you print them in color), shuffle them and have the student pick one randomly and write or say something that incorporates the word on the card and one of the introductory phrases. Then you can actually turn this into a conversation by asking follow-up questions about the situation mentioned by the student.